25 July 2025

Friends brought a paralysed man to see Jesus. They couldn’t get close. They carried him up onto the roof, removed some tiles and lowered the paralysed man down into the crowd so that Jesus could heal him. Jesus was amazed at their faith. He said, ‘Friend, your sins are forgiven.’ The Pharisees were appalled.

Deep down, the Pharisees felt that they were justified in not sharing the paralyzed man’s problem. ‘It’s his own fault!’ they argued. ‘Illness is a consequence of sin!’ He had done something wrong and the consequences had been disastrous.

The trouble with this argument is that it’s easy to agree with it. Something goes wrong. We want to know why. We search our past and, of course, we can always discover things that we did wrong. We don’t need Job’s comforters to tell us, ‘You’ve been bad that’s why this has happened to you.’

But it isn’t true! Yes – Jesus says to the paralyzed man, ‘Friend, your sins are forgiven!’  And yes – he says, ‘I say to you, stand up and take your bed and go to your home.’ But – no! Jesus doesn’t say, ‘You have been paralyzed because you have done something wrong.’

What he does is a magnificent tour de force.  The Pharisees didn’t believe that Jesus could forgive sins. How could he demonstrate it? Anyone could say, ‘Your sins are forgiven!’ But how could you measure the effectiveness of such a statement?

Since the Pharisees believed that the man’s paralysis was tied up with his sin, if Jesus healed him then the sin would have been forgiven. As a consequence, he could forgive sins! And that’s what he does! And, of course, the Pharisees are speechless!